As the news spotlight shone brightly on Twitter yesterday - the company announced a new injection of $100 million in more venture funding - market researcher Hitwise published some new stats about Twitter's growth.
Hitwise's data, measuring visits in the US to the Twitter website - which accounts for some 90% of all Twitter visits - shows a falling-off in visits since June. The company's hypothesis is that "slowing and now decreasing market share of visits may be attributable to the drop in new users." Their post has a number of other charts to support that view.
What interested me mostly about Hitwise's report is that it shows only visits directly to the Twitter website, not taking into account use by people using third-party applications or use on a mobile device.
I think that's a significant aspect of any metrics about Twitter, whether it's the number of new users, usage habits of existing users, user demographics, etc. In April, I speculated that the real number of Twitter users is three times more than any published metrics because of what may be likely in usage of the service on mobile devices.
Of course, that was just a SWAG with no facts to back it up, just hunches. The number I came up with was 60 million. Well, if total number of people now is about 45 million who visit the Twitter website, multiply that by three to include mobile and you come to 135 million.
Is that a realistic and believable number, or purely a flight of fancy? Who knows.
No one seems to be reliably measuring the use of Twitter on mobile devices. More importantly, any trends in mobile device usage with media like Twitter: is it increasing? Falling off? What about particular platforms? And applications?
Isn't anyone doing that?
The figures relate to visits by US users to the Twitter website, which follows a similar report from Hitwise in September. US users account for over 60 percent of all Twitter usage.
Yet such numbers don't include the numbers of users who don't visit the website but instead use Twitter to interact with their communities via third-party applications.
Such figures could be significant and may skew interpretations of any metrics about how people user Twitter, including from what platform (desktop, mobile, etc), as I've wondered about before.
Hitwise says the decline in numbers is mostly due to Facebook's dominance. That may well be so, but could it also be influenced by more people using third-party apps rather than going to the Twitter website? I think it's a reasonable question but I can't find anyone with an answer.
Then there's mobile.
Mobile usage intrigues me most for four primary reasons:
- Updating Twitter on the go is becoming easier literally by the day: it's getting easier to access a network, cellular or wifi, almost anywhere you happen to be as those networks become more widespread, faster and more reliable.
- The ways you can interact with Twitter from a mobile device are rapidly becoming more feature-rich - meaning, you can do far more valuable things to interact with your community than simply send and reply to tweets - as more Twitter apps become available especially on the iPhone, as some existing apps (with strong and loyal customer bases) evolve with additional features and functionality, and as more apps emerge that hook into Twitter (eg, mobile recording audio or doing online shopping and the app tweets your activity).
- Ever more smarter handsets are coming from manufacturers ranging from Apple (iPhone), Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Blackberry, Palm (Pre), Android and others, all with a strong focus on the mobile web and apps rather than just making phone calls and sending text messages.
- Especially in the US, there's a clear trend in increasing overall usage of mobile devices to interact with content of all types on the web according to reports such as Pew Internet's
Twitter and Status Updating, Fall 2009, which shows status updating and social networking "likely to grow as ever more internet users adopt mobile devices as a primary means of going online." Pew's view of the US is echoed elsewhere in the world in the latest monthly report from AdMob published yesterday showing strong growth in mobile usage in other major markets notably India, the UK and a number of countries in Southeast Asia.
So while metrics on Twitter usage such as those from Hitwise are useful pointers on what's been happening, I don't think they're terribly valuable as predictors or even indicators without a more complete picture that includes mobile and third-party apps.
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